She will speak Nov. 10 in Des Moines during the annual Wonder of Words Festival and as part of the author series AViD.

Oct. 25, 2013

Amy Tan / Special to the Register

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Amy Tan

The writer’s free talk at 3 p.m. Nov. 10 at Hoyt Sherman Place is part of the Des Moines Public Library’s AviD Author Series and the annual Wonder of Words Festival. The 12-day festival begins Friday with a range of free and ticketed events in Des Moines, Indianola and Grinnell. The other highlights include: NPR host Michele Norris on race (Nov. 6 at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium), former Register business columnist Dave Elbert on local history (Nov. 7 at the Temple for Performing Arts), Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander on Iowa immigrants and family stories (Nov. 8, also at the Temple), state Sen. Rob Hogg on climate change (Nov. 12 at the Franklin Avenue Library) and an exhibition of miniature books from the Iowa Center for the Book (Friday through Nov. 30 at the Central Library). Find the complete schedule at www.wonderofwordsfest.com.

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It can be a delicate thing to suggest to your family that maybe Granny was a prostitute. Even if you call her a “courtesan,” as the novelist Amy Tan did, it’s still a little dicey.

“They said, ‘Are you sure? How can that be?’ My relatives in China were very upset,” she said.

But it was just such a discovery — or suspicion — that inspired her new book, “The Valley of Amazement,” which she’ll discuss during a free talk Nov. 10, at Hoyt Sherman Place, during the annual Wonder of Words Festival and as part of the author series AViD. The San Francisco writer said she had gone to that city’s Asian Art Museum a few years ago to see an exhibition about Shanghai, where her mother’s ancestors had lived. In the gift shop, she picked up a book about courtesans and, leafing through it, spotted a 1910 photo captioned “The Ten Beauties of Shanghai.”

She was stunned. Five of the women in the photo were wearing clothes that were identical to the ones Tan’s grandmother wore in a favorite photo: an embroidered headband, a fitted jacket with a high fur collar and matching pants.

The book explained that the women had won a beauty contest, having been nominated by their clients. It also said that only courtesans wore such outfits and only courtesans visited Western-style photo studios, like the one that had produced her grandmother’s portrait. Uh-oh.

She dug through the family’s scrapbooks for more clues about the woman she’d always heard was an old-fashioned wife and mom, widowed at age 30. She found other studio photos of her grandmother as a teenager, in edgy hairstyles and tight Western dresses.

As she called around to distant relatives, some described her grandmother as a little mouthy. A complainer. A smoker of opium.

“That’s what thrilled me more than anything: To see this personality in her,” Tan, 51, said. “She was a real person and not this myth, this tragic victim, which is the sense I’d always had of her.”

Tan says she can’t prove her courtesan theory one way or the other. The photographs may have been taken on a whim, taken at some sort of precursor to Glamour Shots that offered specials to bored teenage girls.

But the possibility was strong enough to set the writer’s mind in motion. Her first book in eight years hits stores Nov. 5, with a story about an American woman who follows her lover to China and opens a high-end brothel in Shanghai. She’s tricked into abandoning her daughter, who becomes a courtesan and, like the author herself, searches for the truth about her origins.

That can be a little touchy, but her own mother always encouraged her to be completely, even brutally, honest. Tan recalled the time her mother threatened her with a meat cleaver. Tan was 16 at the time and dating a hippie.

“She thought I was going to ruin my life. My father and brother had just died (both from brain tumors), and she had a feeling we were all destined to die, anyway,” she said. “Most families wouldn’t want that story told, but Mother, instead of getting upset, would turn to somebody and add, ‘Oh, she was so bad. Let me tell you.’ ”

Other relatives have been more guarded. Why dig up the past if it can’t be changed?

“But Mother disagreed,” Tan said. “You tell everybody. You tell the world. That’s how you can change the past.”

Although the author’s themes tend to be serious, she herself is not — at least, not all of the time. On book tours, she said, “audiences that respect me too much are silent when I say something that’s actually funny.”

Tan’s humor shows up sometimes on Twitter, where she has almost 20,000 fans.

Just a few minutes before our interview, in fact, she posted a photo of herself in a hooded wetsuit, standing next to a man in formalwear on the beach at Lake Tahoe. She’d been snorkeling in Lake Tahoe — it was salmon-spawning season — when she decided to ambush the guy like a creature from the deep.

“I became the surprise mermaid bride to this groom, just before his wedding,” she wrote on the photo’s caption.

So who knows? Maybe someday her grandchildren will find that photo and write a novel.